Media-based Navigation with Generic Links

Description/Abstract

Microcosm is an open architecture hypermedia system in which documents remain in their native format and link information is held in separate link databases. This has facilitated the introduction of generic links which, once authored from a text string to a destination anchor, may be followed from any occurrence of the text string in any document. The generic link provides substantial reductions in authoring effort for large hypermedia systems, but the limitation of the generic link to text string source anchors needed to be addressed. This paper describes extensions to the Microcosm architecture to create MAVIS, Microcosm Architecture for Video, Image and Sound, in which generic links may be used from both text and non-text media. This development makes it possible to navigate through non-text media using content as the key and, through the facilities of the dynamic link, content based retrieval is also available. Examples of content based navigation with image, video and sound are presented.